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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

On Wisdom

Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom. A wise man teaching wisdom to someone will sound foolish because wisdom cannot be expressed in words. Wisdom is something that you discover through your life’s experiences and learnings. Every man discovers his wisdom in his own way.

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“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Plato

“Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers; a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements.” ~ Jonathan Barnes

Aristotle

“Aristotle came from the very edge of the Greek world. He was a Greek to the last fiber of his being, yet he remained the aloof, impartial observer, not deeply implicated in the struggles of that world.” ~ John Herman Randall, Jr.

Experts Versus Authority Figures
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Progress in science happens through the efforts of experts; when authority
figures gain control, there is fall in scientific standards. The experts
are by ...

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” ~ Goethe

David Hume

"In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles." ~ David Hume

“Only barbarians feel no curiosity about the sources of their own forms of life and civilization, their place in the world order as determined by the antecedent experiences of their ancestors, as well as the very identity of these ancestors, which alone can give a sense of identity to their successors.” ~ Isaiah Berlin

Immanuel Kant

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and more enduringly reflection is occupied with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” ~ Immanuel Kant

"Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man." ~ David Hume

Hegel

“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” ~ Hegel

"Within twelve months Greece had lost her greatest ruler [Alexander], her greatest orator [Demosthenes], and her greatest philosopher [Aristotle]. The glory that had been Greece faded now in the dawn of the Roman sun; and the grandeur that was Rome was the pomp of power rather than the light of thought. Then that grandeur too decayed, that little light went almost out. For a thousand years darkness brooded over the face of Europe. All the world awaited the resurrection of philosophy." ~ Will Durant

“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote

The Conservative Socrates

Philosophers are of two kinds: the “preachers of the truth” and the “seekers of the truth.” I am the second kind of philosopher — I am a seeker.

“The era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.” ~ Albert Camus

"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning." ~ Louis L'Amour

"For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise." ~ Benjamin Franklin

“I admit that the exercises of the gymnasium form athletic bodies; but beauty is only developed by the free and equal play of the limbs. In the same way the tension of the isolated spiritual forces may make extraordinary men; but it is only the well−tempered equilibrium of these forces that can produce happy and accomplished men.” ~ Friedrich Schiller

“The dogmatist is a more serious character than the utter skeptic. He is the dictator of cognition. He will put you down by main force. And he is no myth.” ~ Stephen C. Pepper

“You know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the intention merely of refuting them, but that in thinking them over I always weave them into my judgments, and af­ford them the opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs. I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impartially from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my previous insight may be obtainable.” ~ Immanuel Kant

“Political and civic freedom remains eternally the most sacred of all things, the most deserving aim of all effort, the great center of all culture; but this wondrous structure can only be built on the solid foundation of an ennobled character. One has to begin with the creation of the citizens for a constitution, before these citizens can be granted a constitution.” ~ Friedrich Schiller

“Where Plato is whimsical and ironic, and proceeds by suggestion and indirection, Aristotle is matter-of-fact, almost pedestrian. Where Plato’s writing is filled with his sense of better and more beautiful world behind, above, beyond the world of ordinary experience, illuminating that experience but transcending it, Aristotle keeps his feet firm on the ground of ordinary experience. This is Aristotle's reality, and the business of philosophy in his view is to make sense of the here and now.” ~ W. T. Jones

“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, nor an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer... with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.” ~ Sigmund Freud

"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.” ~ Oscar. Wilde

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing" ~ W. Edwards Deming

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed." ~ Marcus Aurelius

"When two or more independent insights cross a new philosophy is born." ~ Henri Bergson

"The greatest thing on earth is to know how to belong to oneself. Everyone looks in front of them. But I look inside myself. I have no concerns but my own. I constantly reflect on myself; I control myself; I taste myself. We owe some things to society, but the greater part of ourselves." ~ Michel de Montaigne

The government claims that it wants to reduce the suffering, but its policies seem to increase it.

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." ~ Samuel Johnson

“I much prefer that my own style be my own, uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else’s, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but one that, deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect.” ~ Francesco Petrarch

"There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless." ~ Thomas Paine

“It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank–to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning,–it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.–The noble soul has reverence for itself.” ~ Nietzsche

"Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for "equality": your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue words." ~ Nietzsche

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." ~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

"A sentence in Atlas Shrugged that is applicable to all rational people, but particularly to writers, is the one where I say that Dagny “regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality.” in regard to words, this should be the motto of every writer." ~ Ayn Rand

"I have received, sir, your new book against the human race, and I thank you for it. No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go about all fours." ~ Voltaire in a letter to Rousseau

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." ~ Immanuel Kant

“Ah Monsieur, you see now that Jean Jacques Rousseau resembles a philosopher as a monkey resembles a man… He is the dog of Diogenes gone mad.” ~ Voltaire

"Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.” ~ Margret Tatcher

"If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization." —Ludwig von Mises

"But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." ~ George Orwell

"I have always written my works with my whole body: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are." ~ Nietzsche

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." ~ Calvin Coolidge.

"[storytelling is] an animation of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." ~ Aristotle

"Communist Party has been deliberately following Lenin's instruction, "First confuse the vocabulary." Thinking can be done only in words. Accurate thinking requires words of precise meaning. Communication between human beings is impossible without words whose precise meaning is generally understood.... Confuse the vocabulary, and people do not know what is happening; they can not communicate an alarm; they can not achieve any common purpose. Confuse the vocabulary, and millions are helpless against a small, disciplined number who know what they mean when they speak. Lenin had brains." ~ Rose Wilder Lane

"It is a flat truism that all attempts to deal with philosophical problems from the point of view, or with the method, of any other discipline will inevitably result in the destruction of philosophy itself." ~ Etienne Gilson

“There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy.” ~ Victor Hugo

"Continual idleness should have been placed among the pains of Hell; it seems to me, on the other hand, that it has been placed among the joys of Heaven." ~ Montesquieu

“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.” ~ Voltaire

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." ~ Denis Diderot

"If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"Not only have intellectuals been insulated from material consequences, they have often enjoyed immunity from even a loss of reputation after having been demonstrably wrong." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." ~ Henry Louis Mencken

"As language is the faculty which distinguishes man from the lower animals, it is also a ready index to the intellectual level of cultures and persons. The confusion and vagueness of terms always found in collectivist theories is not accidental; it is a reversion to the mental and verbal limitations of the primitive society it advocates, the inability to think in abstract terms." ~ Isabel Paterson

"Everyone must understand philosophy, because even arguing against the practice of philosophy is itself a form of philosophizing. The best form of philosophy is the contemplation of the universe of nature; it is for this purpose that God made human beings and gave them a godlike intellect." ~ Aristotle

"But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended." ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed." ~ Louis L'Amour

"Too many voters are already bought -not by corporate campaign donors, but by the government itself." ~ Joseph Sobran

"You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business agent who handles your money, for a job." ~ Jack London

"Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.” ~ Margret Thatcher

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." ~ Thomas Jefferson

“But from time to time do ye grant me—one glimpse, grant me but one glimpse only, of something perfect, fully realised, happy, mighty, triumphant, of something that still gives cause for fear! A glimpse of man that justifies the existence of man, a glimpse of an incarnate human happiness that realizes and redeems, for the sake of which one may hold fast to the belief in man!” ~ Nietzsche.

“Just as cognition establishes a relation between knower and known, and thus turns a thing into an object of knowledge, but does not thereby cause it to exist or to have the particular nature that it has, so too our desiring establishes a relation between the desirer and the desired, and thus turns something into an object of desire, but does not thereby cause it to exist or to have its particular nature. The relationship of dependence is one-way in both cases. Cognition depends on the object cognized in order for there to be truth, and desire depends on the object desired in order for there to be goodness. In both cases, the object provides the standard or measure.” ~ Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen

"They forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the Eternal City, ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of personal freedom and dream of a strange freedom of the species; reject solitary death and give the name of immortality to a vast collective agony. They no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man." ~ Albert Camus

"These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth." ~ Edmund Burke

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." ~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

“For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

~ T. S. Elliot

“The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“Social evils cannot be reformed by legislation; defects of government machinery cannot be repaired by changes in the constitution; differences of opinion cannot be settled by compromise.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." ~ George Santayana

"One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"In National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The quest for the origin must take into account that the world of our experience is not a static structure but a process; and the speculation on the origin must project (in one symbolism or another) this experience into a process in the origin itself.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.” ~ Jacob Bronowski

“Can you be a conservative and believe in God? Obviously. Can you be a conservative and not believe in God? This is an empirical essay, and so the answer is, as obviously, yes. Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in him? I would say no.” ~ William F. Buckley

“The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their "nature" is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.” ~ Hannah Arendt

“Carefree, mocking, violent–this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior.” ~ Nietzsche

“Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.” ~ Nietzsche

“Hubris characterizes our attitude towards ourselves,–for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals, we merrily vivisect our souls out of curiosity: that is how much we care about the ‘salvation’ of the soul!” ~ Nietzsche

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ~ James Joyce